Lemon Chicken Orzo Soup

Yes, this is the second soup recipe in less than a week. And no, I’m not sorry. In fact, I’m the opposite of sorry. More soup! More soup! #cantstopwontstop

This recipe is essentially a jazzed up chicken noodle soup. I love what the lemon and feta bring to the soup. While this is still has a comfort food feel, the lemon adds some brightness to the dish, and the feta pairs well with all of the ingredients.

Dan and I both have our bones to pick with chicken noodle soup. Dan isn’t a big fan of noodle-y soups (he may have had too many cans of sad Campbells). Chicken noodle soup has always made me squeamish as well. Bites of pure chicken fat or bones made it one of my least favorite soups growing up. I guess that my soup was a little TOO homemade. So we basically have the opposite issues with chicken noodle soup, ha! But we both liked this soup a lot. I think the lemony freshness and assertive flavor of the feta helped in avoiding the canned food flashbacks for Dan and didn’t bring me back to the days of spitting out chicken fat.

I made this with the pre-cooked chicken that I had on hand, but you could easily throw a couple chicken breasts in at the beginning of cooking and then take them out and shred them at the end. You could also add celery or carrots to make this even more of a traditional chicken noodle. A thing I would have done differently is cook the onions a little longer to bring out more of their sweetness, so I adjusted for this in the recipe timing.

This recipe is simple with very little prep time, so it’s a great Monday night dish (aka more time to continue the Netflix binging, Making a Murderer anyone??)

Place the butter in a large 6-8 quart sauce pot over medium-low heat. Peel the onion and chop it. Once the butter is hot, saute the onion and minced garlic for 5-10 minutes to soften.

Add the chicken stock, chicken, lemon zest, orzo, and crushed red pepper to the pot. Raise the heat to high, cover, and bring to a boil. Once boiling, reduce the heat to medium, then simmer until orzo is done.

Then turn the heat off. Add lemon juice and salt to taste*. Top with feta.

I used a couple of squeezes of lemon juice and no salt as my broth was already salty enough